Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost put up an interesting post this morning regarding the emerging church movement:
Emerging Into What?I responded in his comments section:
I’m hesitant to be critical of anything that brings people closer to Christ. But the more I read and learn about the emergent church movement the more I wonder, “Is the emergent church simply just a “Seeker-Sensitive” worship style for the tattooed and pierced demographic?
After a fashion, yes. But in the same breath, it's a bit more complex than that. Speaking as a minister in a mainline denomination, we often seem to have this monolithic view of the church and its forms of worship that existed intact from the Reformation until the advent of Vietnam and the Boomers. Then all of a sudden, people started questioning the relevance of faith and dropping out, so we started tailoring our worship to accomplish our outreach.I will endeavor to follow up here over the next few days with some cultural and philosophical observations. (Yeah, yeah, yeah ... I also intended to talk about cynicism vs. skepticism and what happens when punditry and pride collide. I haven't forgotten. All in due time.) Posted by Mike at January 5, 2004 01:20 PM | TrackBackNothing could be further from the truth. The church has struggled throughout its existence with the whole "new wine, old wineskins" thing. I think that the emergent church movement is a valid attempt on the part of many contemporary Christians to unhitch the gospel from modernist, post-Enlightenment categories and reconsider them in postmodern categories.
Therein lies the difficulty, for postmodernism is not really a "school" of philosophy or a movement like others that have gone before it. If I can draw the analogy of a churning stock market, postmodernism is basically the churning cultural undercurrent that has resulted from the realization that modernism and its philosophical underpinnings are structurally deficient.
As such, postmodernism gives rise to a deconstructionist mindset that questions the reasons for existing institutional structures. For this reason, em-church sounds a lot like seeker-sensitive redux, but I think there's far more to it than that.